


Deck the Halls of Your Broken Heart

by e_cat



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Christmas Decorations, I also wish it was longer but I kind of did it at the last minute..., I didn't even mean for that to be the focus - it just happened, I needed a title to put this on AO3 so I made one up out of thin air, I think it's more melancholy than the fic itself, I'm not entirely sure this has a discernable plot either, M/M, Pynch Secret Santa 2016, and I wrote Ronan grieving again...
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-24
Updated: 2016-12-24
Packaged: 2018-09-11 19:52:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,442
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9008719
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/e_cat/pseuds/e_cat
Summary: Adam comes back to the Barns to find that Ronan has put up Christmas decorations. A lot of them.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this for the [Pynch Secret Santa](http://pynchsecretsanta.tumblr.com) thing for [thehufflepuffshuffle](http://thehufflepuffshuffle.tumblr.com/)!

Growing up, Adam would sometimes romanticize the idea of overspending on a holiday: Halloween cemetery decorations sprawling across an expansive lawn; fat plastic Easter eggs hardly-hidden in the bushes, each one filled with cash or treats; Christmas lights so bright and so abundant that people two streets away could see them. It had been so far from the seldom-acknowledged holidays in his own home that it had functioned for young Adam rather like a fairy tale: a picturesque fantasy; a happily-ever-after escape. It had been a story to tell himself on a cold Christmas Eve, that one day he would wake up and find decorations by the dozen. It had been comforting, even though he’d known that it wouldn’t happen any time soon.

As he’d gotten older, however, he’d ceased to believe in even the _eventually_ of that fabled holiday. It was still a nice story, but it wasn’t one that could ever come true, if only because old habits died hard, and Adam couldn’t wrap his head around a version of himself who threw away money on such trivialities. That apparently didn’t mean, however, that he wouldn’t end up with someone who did.

It was less than one week before Christmas. Christmas was one of those holidays that Adam had never celebrated. His parents weren’t really religious, and Adam still haunted himself with the memory of the one time he’d asked why he didn’t get presents during the holiday break like all of his classmates. In past years, Gansey’s attempts at dragging Adam into Christmas celebration had been turned down, and neither Ronan nor Noah had ever really tried. Again, Adam’s expectation hadn’t been that that would change, regardless of the introduction of Blue and Opal and maybe Henry, the absence of Noah, or even the fact that he was dating Ronan.

Well, maybe he should have known better than that. After everything that had happened – Noah, Gansey, Aurora – Ronan had shut down for weeks, setting blank stares on walls and hardly moving for anything Adam or Gansey or Blue didn’t make him move for. And then, one day he’d gotten up and cleaned out half the house. After Adam had forced him to eat dinner, he’d cleaned out the other half. Adam wasn’t sure what would happen when Ronan ran out of buildings on the property to sort through, or ran out of places to put the dream items he was cleaning out of them.

Apparently, Ronan was taking a break from that, though. Today, the trash bins were overflowing with the torn-open packaging of every imaginable Christmas decoration. Inflatable and light-up snowmen, Santas, and reindeer made the fields look like an overzealous store advertisement. Christmas lights were draped around the edges of every building in sight, and every room that Adam had ventured into so far had been crowded full with nutcrackers, garlands, Christmas trees, and gifts, some of them labeled with his name.

“Ronan?” Adam called up the stairs. Everything inside the farmhouse looked imaginary – flooded with artificially colorful lighting and drenched in the scent of nutmeg and peppermint. Adam wasn’t sure how to feel about his suspicion that Ronan hadn’t dreamt any of it.

Just as Adam was debating whether to head up the stairs or check out in the barns first, Opal came skidding in through the back door. If it was possible, she looked like even more Christmas concentrated in a small area than the rest of the house. At the very least, she appeared to be wearing two different holiday sweaters, an antler headband, and, inexplicably, a pair of butterfly wings. Over all of this, she was tangled in several layers of Christmas lights which thankfully didn’t seem to be plugged in, but were dragging in a long tail behind her. To top it all off, she was wearing a stocking on each of her extremities.  
“Adam!” she shrieked, tackling him with an enthusiastic, if short-lived, hug. Before Adam could even hug back, she was sliding across the floor again.

“Wait!” he called after her. “Where’s Ronan?” But it was no use; she was already gone, her Christmas lights slithering after her.

Adam sighed and made up his mind to look for Ronan outside first; if that was where Opal had just been, it seemed likely that that was where Ronan was, too. So, Adam headed out towards the cow barn, popping in at whatever buildings he passed on his way, just to be thorough. As expected, however, Ronan was sorting through the pile of dream objects he’d shoved into his father’s old office in the main barn. Again.

There was something unexpected, however: a complicated path of Christmas lights weaving an obstacle course through the interior of the building. It wrapped around rafters and beams and, less conventionally, cows. “I’m not even going to ask whose idea this was,” Adam said.

Ronan looked up from his sorting. “Oh,” he said. “Hi.” It seemed like he wanted to say more, but he apparently had no words left. Adam didn’t know what to call the expression on his face, but he knew that he didn’t like it. It was conspicuously lacking in Christmas cheer for someone who’d just spent the day decorating an enormous property for the holiday.

“So, you’ve been busy,” Adam observed, hoping to convince Ronan to talk a little. He laughed half-heartedly. “I’m surprised you didn’t dream up some supernatural snowstorm to go with all of it.” He wasn’t surprised, though; Ronan hadn’t brought anything back in weeks. At least, not on purpose. Accordingly, Ronan just stared at him instead of responding.

Adam sighed heavily and made his way over to sit on the floor beside Ronan, ducking under strings of lights as he went. “You must be tired after all that, though,” he offered. “Did Opal decorate anything besides herself?”

Ronan cracked a hollow half-grin. “She stole some of my lights,” he said. “Now the far field only spells out ‘uck yo.’”

Adam let out a startled laugh. “And you let her get away with that?” he teased. He wasn’t surprised, though, when Ronan didn’t really react to his lighthearted tone. He let it hang in the air for a minute, and then he reached over and took Ronan’s hand off the pile of dream things. “You’re tired,” he said. It was an obvious conclusion, after all the work Ronan had put into this Christmas display, and after all the time Ronan hadn’t spent sleeping the past few nights. “Come inside. You can untangle Opal, and I’ll make hot chocolate.”

“Sure, you get the easy job,” Ronan muttered. But he shoved to his feet anyways, his hand still in Adam’s. It wasn’t clear whether to count this easy surrender as a triumph accomplished atop a stack of more difficult surrenders, or to take it as Ronan being far more tired than he was letting on. Probably the latter, Adam thought, though he chose not to question it.

“What do you want for dinner?” he asked instead. “I could make spaghetti, pizza. We could go out.”

“We should make cookies,” Ronan replied without enthusiasm. “I told Opal we would make cookies.”

Resisting the urge to ask if Opal even knew what cookies were, Adam said, “That can wait until tomorrow. I don’t have to go in until the late shift, so we can all work on them. Tonight, let’s just eat dinner and relax. Okay?”

Ronan shrugged. “You’ll have to break the news,” he said, which was again an easier victory than Adam had anticipated. He smiled, though he wasn’t sure he wanted to. Part of him felt resentful of this careless display of money, of the fact that he couldn’t really be angry over Ronan just trying to cope. He let it be smothered by the larger part of himself that was just concerned with Ronan and squeezed Ronan's hand.

Inside the main house, Adam walked with Ronan to the living room first. He stopped them in front of the sofa and then gently pushed Ronan onto it. “Ten minutes,” he said. “Don’t you dare go anywhere.”

Ronan rolled his eyes and muttered under his breath, “I’m not a fucking child.” He seemed willing enough to stay put, however, so Adam headed over to the stairs.

“Opal,” he called, “we’re having hot chocolate!” The clatter of her hoofs above let him know that she’d heard, so he turned back to Ronan. “Hey,” he said, offering a smile. “You know I’m glad to be here, right?”

“Don’t be so fucking sappy, Parrish,” Ronan scoffed, but his red cheeks sang a different tune. A second later, he added, “I’m glad you’re here, too.”


End file.
